While Google have never fully disclosed all of the ranking factors that are part of their search algorithm, they have said on many a occasion that there are around 200 or so of them. Single Grain and Backlinko decided to put together the following infographic which is the best “guesstimate” of what those ranking factors might be.

It is becoming more evident everyday that we are living in a Google world. What began as a search engine has quickly evolved into many additional things. Just this month, Google entered the cell phone business with the release of the Nexus One. They are also working their way into the real estate business. What’s next? This post takes a somewhat humorous look at possible Google acquisitions for 2010 and beyond.

If you are a local business and want to be found on Google Maps, you will want to make sure you are listed first of all. Along with that, you might also want to pay close attention to some new guidelines Google has issued regarding their goal to keep Google Maps a great source of information for users and business owners alike.

When Google decided to acquire DoubleClick nearly a year ago, many in the search marketing industry were very concerned that Google now owned a SEO company – Performics. It would be a huge conflict of interest to have a organic search index and yet at the same time be making money providing a service that helps companies to improve their positioning in that index. When the acquisition was finally approved last month, Danny Sullivan wrote an open letter asking Google to do the right thing.

Now that Google officially owns DoubleClick, there is another dilemma at hand and that is they also own a SEO company. Is this a conflict of interest? Absolutely! Let’s face it – Google is now in the SEO business – selling services through DoubleClick’s Performics to people who want to rank well on search engines, including Google. This also places Google in the paid inclusion business, something it called evil back in 2004, when it went public.

Danny Sullivan has written an open letter to Google asking them to do the right thing – namely to spin off Performics as they should not own such a company.

It is all over the blogosphere – sites known for selling text link ads or Google PageRank have been slapped with a PageRank reduction for their own sites by the almighty Google itself. Is this a worldwide PR update with a possible algorithm change or is it more along the line of a hand job? Seeing that a couple of sites we launched several months ago are still at a “0″ PageRank, even though they have a good amount of links pointing to them, I’d have to say the latter. The question that remains to be answered is, “should publishers and those buying links be worried?”

I started my Monday off with a strange phone conversation. I had put together a proposal for a potential client for both SEO and paid search management. The SEO portion of the proposal involved an initial cost which would allow us to develop and implement a strategy to optimize their site so that they could improve their visibility for organic search. Following up today with a phone meeting, my point of contact said they had just spoken to someone at Google who said that “Google” themselves would optimize their site for nothing – no initial investment, no set up costs, free. The potential client’s next question – “Why would we pay you to do something that Google will do for free?”

I was asked recently if Google’s dominance in search would ever change, at least anytime soon, to which I responded that I did not believe so unless they make a major mistake. And what is the most crucial area that Google needs to pay close attention to? How they handle privacy.

More and more Internet users are worried about the amount of information Google and other search engines have on them. In fact, my father recently told me that he was through with Google because he feels they have become a type of “big brother.” He does not trust their privacy policy practices.